Glavin: The very least Canada can do is resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees now

Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau speaks at a victory rally in Ottawa on October 20, 2015 after winning the general election. Canadians will soon find out what "real change" means, as Parliament comes back Monday.NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP/Getty Images

It wasn’t exactly auspicious, the way Justin Trudeau chose to set the inaugural tone for his new Liberal government at that rally in Ottawa on Tuesday by way of introducing himself to Canada’s “friends around the world,” whoever they might be. “Many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassion over the past 10 years. I have a simple message for you: On behalf of 35 million Canadians, we’re back.”

The thing is, we’ve all heard this before. In the October, 2007 Speech from the Throne, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government put it this way: “Rebuilding our capabilities and standing up for our sovereignty have sent a clear message to the world: Canada is back as a credible player on the international stage.”

Throughout his wild come-from-behind ride to a Liberal party majority in Monday’s election, Trudeau struck the same note, time and again: Canada will return from posturing and belligerent rhetoric to measurable influence and multilateral coherence. In 2007, too, it was “focus and influence” to which Canada was said to be returning, from a long Liberal period of “rhetoric and posturing.”

Back then, as now, whichever version of Canada had returned, or is only now returning, from whatever place the country may or may not have vanished – and whether anyone would really have noticed had Canada been missing or not – will depend entirely upon whatever one might want these things to mean, and upon how one voted. So, some things, it seems, have not much changed.

The world, however, has changed, with or without us, and almost unimaginably. Throughout the long and now mercifully concluded federal election campaign it was never really clear whether the penny had dropped, whether Trudeau or Harper or the New Democratic Party’s Thomas Mulcair have any idea just how deeply and disastrously the international order has fallen into disarray. Or perhaps they are aware, but it was all just too complicated to talk about openly and honestly while campaigning. Maybe it was just because piety and platitude give off a better vibe.

Even the most momentous of events barely warranted notice. On Sept. 30, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations General Assembly that the Oslo Accords – the peace agreements that have provided the only semblance of stability in Israel and the West Bank for more than two decades – are dead letters. Owing to Israeli intransigence, Palestinians “cannot continue to be bound” by the Oslo peace process, Abbas declared. Ever since, fear and horror and random stabbings have become part of daily life in the heart of Jerusalem, the violence is spiralling, and there’s no telling where it’s all headed.

An international order guaranteed mostly by the United States ever since the end of the Cold War is on its last legs. In the eight years since Harper’s 2007 “Canada is back” Throne Speech, the global democracy indicators tracked by the Freedom House organization have been heading downwards, every year. The “Arab Spring” came and went. China has become a viciously kleptocratic police state again. Russia has reverted to the worst truncheon and hit-squad indecencies of the Soviet era. Venezuela has been ruined by Chavismo lunacy. The hard men in uniform are back in power in Egypt. Turkey, a NATO ally, is descending into a nightmare of civil war and ethnic fratricide.

On Sept. 21, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama appeared before the United Nations General Assembly in New York and delivered a famously uplifting speech that looked forward to the better times ahead. “Let there be no doubt, the tide of war is receding,” he told the assembled delegates. In the years since, annual deaths from armed conflicts have nearly quadrupled, and the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism database counts six times as many people killed by terrorists every year. Almost all the mayhem is underway in an arc of the planet from North Africa to Central Asia – precisely the regions being vacated by the NATO powers, and precisely the blighted regions of the earth now churning out most of the world’s millions of refugees.

The one foreign policy promise Justin Trudeau has already made good on is his commitment to join in that retreat, and this too is less than auspicious. In a brief and perfunctory telephone call that touched on all the expected subjects and niceties, Trudeau informed Obama that Canada’s six CF-18s are going to be taken out of the American-led alliance patrolling the skies above that swathe of Syria and Iraq that has become a jihadi hell on earth controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Fair enough. While Trudeau failed to come up with so much as one good reason last year to oppose Canada’s meagre contribution to the anti-ISIL alliance, at least he didn’t made a parade of his objections in bellbottoms and tie-dyed shirts the way the New Democrats did at the time, which is what New Democrats always do when these difficult subjects come up. In any case, the alliance’s immediately necessary work of heading off a genocide of the Yazidi minority and a fatal encirclement of the Kurds has been accomplished. Canada’s Special Operations Regiment will continue working with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Besides, the whole show is now mostly an Obama administration public-relations exercise anyway.

Meanwhile, having annexed Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine to no great penalty, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is dispatching armadas of fighter planes and bombers into the vacuum the “war weary” Western powers have left in Syria in Russia’s first military incursion beyond the old Warsaw Pact sphere since the 1970s. Putin’s main purpose is to rub Obama’s nose in the unpardonable hash he’s made of American “policy” in the region. In the bargain, Putin gets to shore up the mass-murderer Bashar Assad, the main culprit, by far, in the slaughter of Syrian civilians and the sundering of four million of the survivors to the status of homeless, stateless refugees.

This brings us to the one thing Trudeau can and must do, immediately, to make some small use of himself. Apart from bringing our CF-18s home, it’s the only other key promise Trudeau made that relates to the gangrenous wound that America’s retreats have opened up in the region. He needs to straight away resettle at least 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada. That was his solemn promise.

For mercy’s sake, for decency’s sake, if “Canada has not lost its compassion,” and if “Canada is back” from wherever this country is supposed to have been, then let Canada come back this way, and let’s be right quick about it.

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